Empirical research aimed at understanding how individuals interact andshare their knowledge in a distributed software development environment hastraditionally been very difficult because the source of knowledge, the code, hasbeen a guarded secret and software developers and users were seldom in contact,thus making it difficult to study, in situ, all the individuals involved in the softwaredevelopment process. Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) projects presentsrenewed opportunities, as well as challenges, in understanding collaboration andknowledge sharing amongst software developers and users in distributed softwaredevelopment environments. In this paper, we discuss how developers and usersshare their knowledge and collaborate in the software development process.Knowledge sharing metrics, software repositories, and suitable methodologies forstudying knowledge sharing are presented. The paper aims to stimulate discussion,present our current understanding, and empirical research opportunities andchallenges in knowledge sharing in distributed collective practices - F/OSSprojects.

3.
Knowledge sharing in distributed software development environments
Knowledge sharing:
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A synergistic process where project participants establish knowledge links (k) by
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“talking to each other”, and in the process get more than they put in:
kAB= 1 if there is knowledge sharing between actors A and B, and 0 if otherwise.
Benefits:
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Produce goods (software) and services (support).
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Develop and refine project strategies.
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Enable individual and project learning.
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Helps build trust and confidence among participants.
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Problems:
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How to leverage tacit knowledge of
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community members?
How to coordinate disperse individuals?
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Providing easy to use tools for light-
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weight knowledge sharing?
Ways and means of studying team
–
members?
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Annals of Knowledge Sharing in Distributed Software Development Environments:
Experience from Open Source Software Projects By SKSowe

4.
Knowledge sharing enablers
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1
2
But we must ask
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Is there knowledge sharing?
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Knowledge sharing
Who are the people involved?
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in the Bazaar
How much knowledge sharing are team members?
–
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Annals of Knowledge Sharing in Distributed Software Development Environments:
Experience from Open Source Software Projects By SKSowe

6.
Knowledge sharing metrics
Experience from the sqo-oss and Flossmetrics projects
Shows, in addition to product and process metrics,
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Composite community metrics are needed to understand the dynamics of
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F/OSS development teams.
Source code - CVS/SVN
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Count developers who made commits to the same module/branch of the code; Count
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developers who commented on the code; Count cross-repository participation,
etc.
Bug tracking systems:
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Count open critical bugs at time_x; Count critical bugs fixed at time_x; Average time
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to fix N bugs; Knowledge link between bug reporters and fixers, etc.
Mailing lists:
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Count unique subscribers; Count messages per list per time_x; Average thread depth;
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x_members in more than 1 list (knowledge brokerage)
Total number of emails posted to a list (nposts)
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Total number of replies made to questions posted to the lists (nreplies)
–
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Annals of Knowledge Sharing in Distributed Software Development Environments:
Experience from Open Source Software Projects By SKSowe

9.
Nature of knowledge sharing in F/OSS projects..cont.
5): Knowledge sharing in more than 1 repository:
Developers tend to commit more to svn than post to mailing lists. But results are
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inconclusive!
Source: Flossmetrics database( ref. WOPDaSD08); 468 developers made 96749
commits, 61258 posts.
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Annals of Knowledge Sharing in Distributed Software Development Environments:
Experience from Open Source Software Projects By SKSowe

10.
Knowledge sharing in F/OSS projects...some research challenges
How to deal with large quantity of data?
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Howe to study software development teams from more than 1 view point – using data
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from different repositories?
How to link data points from different repositories?
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How to ensure anonymity in the data (eg. Emails)?
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Are team members really interested to 'see' and know what their colleagues are
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doing?
Is ontology based folksonomics the right way to go to provide collaborative platforms?
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Experience from http://www.osor.eu/
Thanks a lot for your attention
Questions & Comments
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Annals of Knowledge Sharing in Distributed Software Development Environments:
Experience from Open Source Software Projects By SKSowe